Sorry, I could not resist the title ...
Nick Boldrini Wrote:
"I think also the thing to consider is that, in my view, the SMR/GIS is a
guide, not a be all and end all. Only when all available data has been
looked at can you determine what the edge of a polygon means. ... As a
monument is a
nebulous entity interpreted from all the event info, doesnt this mean that a
polygon is a snap shot of someone's judgement of a monuments extents, at the
time the polygon was drawn, rather than a definitive description? In which
case, each polygon can be seen more as a freeze frame of an ongoing process,
rather than an end point of that process. If that is so, then the problem of
boundaries is less of an issue, as archaeologists can (and do, often, and
usually loudly) disagree over their interpretations. The key thing, though,
is to make sure that the idea of what a polygon is representing is clear to
whomever gets the data. And this view of what the polygon represent can also
change as the data is cleaned, more data added, and the edges become more
confident."
I think that Nick has stated more clearly something that I was grasping at -
that any output from an SMR, in whatever format, is a snapshot of the data
set, interpreted by whoever did the outputting (is this a real word?).
Whilst this is also true of other GIS data sets, it is perhaps more extreme
when we are dealing with the very variable world of archaeological
information. Are there any Information Scientists out there who deal with
this sort of thing and can give us pointers, theoretical and practical, to
methods of dealing with these 'faulty' datasets?
Oh, and a foolproof way of convincing other people to be sufficiently (but
not excessively) cautious about re-interpreting our data.
Peter Iles
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